Ciara Alyse Harris, Phoenix Best, Whitney White, and Holli’ Conway in Macbeth in Stride. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

Macbeth in Stride is billed as a “love letter to music and Shakespeare” in writer/performer Whitney White’s program note, but its DNA also draws on the earnestness of an old-school autobiographical solo show, in ways that often don’t serve its aims of illuminating the modernity of Shakespeare or making theater feel more like a rock concert. White—trained as an actor, now working as a performer, a playwright, a television writer, and a stage director—has clearly grappled with the challenges of being an ambitious Black female artist. She’s clearly coming to Macbeth with both an actor’s and a director’s understanding of its contradictions and of the puzzle that is Lady Macbeth. She revels in every minute of holding the stage as both actor and singer, and fills the show with music in a variety of pop genres. She’s collaborating with some of New York’s finest theater talent, from directors Taibi Magar and Tyler Dobrowsky to choreographer Raja Feather Kelly to designers like Qween Jean and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew. 

And yet only in fleeting moments does Macbeth in Stride see its elements and ideas click together so that it successfully modernizes Shakespeare and explicates contemporary Black female ambition at the same time. More often, it shuttles back and forth self-consciously, calling attention to slipping in and out of Shakespeare by speaking directly to the audience on What Black Women Want, but without really giving us a fully realized Black woman who wants these things. Rather than fusing its multiple aims, the show gets trapped between them: White using the individual story of the central character, Woman–who may not be literally autobiographical, but in context is presented as such–to explain how she interprets Lady Macbeth versus channeling Lady Macbeth’s rage and craving for a power that her society denies her to illuminate an archetypal Woman’s narrative. The immersive energy of a concert versus musical theater’s use of songs to express emotions and carry narrative. A bold, glittering stage persona that’s part queen, part diva (a la Six, whose costumes and stage design are faintly echoed here) versus a more intimate, confessional persona narrative.  

Also, to the extent that we do see Woman as an analogue for White, the play feels like it reflects a much earlier moment of her own career–yet if we take Woman as a fictional character, she becomes unhelpfully generic. It’s an uneasy fit to see this Tony nominee—who just a few weeks ago as a director had one of the season’s most acclaimed plays, Liberation, and a Broadway revival of the musical The Last Five Years running simultaneously; who as a writer had a play done at Hudson Valley Shakespeare last year and wrote for the 2023 streaming TV series I’m a Virgo, as well as writing and starring in this piece at BAM–as someone whose ambition is being thwarted in the way Lady Macbeth’s was. But it’s also hard to map an Everywoman story onto the bloodthirstiness and madness to which Lady Macbeth descends. Even the incompatibility between love and ambition that the script charts feels out of sync as biography–according to press that includes a recent New York Times profile, she’s also the married parent of a toddler–but not well enough developed to flesh out a fictional character.

If the whole is unsatisfying, individual moments and ideas show the promise of the idea. The witches (Phoenix Best, Holli’ Conway, Ciara Alyse Harris), in long fringed skirts mirrored by their intricate long braids (costumes by Qween Jean and hair by Rachel Padula-Shufelt), set the right tone, part Tina Turner, part mystic, part tell-it-like-it is best friend; their opening song is one of the moments where Shakespeare meets Black culture meets modern music most successfully. Macbeth (Charlie Thurston) as an eyeliner-wearing, tribal-tattooed, emo rocker with accordion makes perfect sense, and the way Macbeth in Stride gives real heat to the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth works. Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s saturated lighting sets moods effectively, evoking both the rock concert and the misty moors of Scotland.

But the approach to Lady Macbeth as a character tends toward the didactic, pausing to overexplain her thoughts and actions and even taking a long pause to make sure the audience understands what’s actually happening in Macbeth–even though that pause both is oddly late if the audience is lost and explains some key plot points of Macbeth that aren’t actually relevant to what’s being done here. It feels a little like White, Magar, and Dobrowsky don’t trust the audience to come in knowing the Shakespeare–or trust their own work enough to pare back the exposition.

I ended up wishing I could see White play Lady Macbeth, more than I felt convinced by the hybrid she’s created here; the moments when she drops fully into that character show the passion, rage, and ambition that the world has thwarted; show that desperation for self-determination that leads to all the terrible choices the Macbeths make.